With the ever increasing popularity of video cassettes for home viewing, it has become desirable to make such cassettes more easily available to the public in readily accessible areas. At the present time, most video cassette rentals or purchases are through rental clubs or stores which maintain large libraries of current and past video releases for rental or sale. Such business establishments require the leasing of building space together with employment of personnel to manage the daily business affairs thereof. To eliminate lease costs as well as personnel costs, it has been suggested that an alternative method of renting and selling cassettes is by means of video dispensing machines. Such machines are disclosed in U.S. Pat. Nos. 4,589,810 to Shore et al; 4,300,040 and 4,414,467 to Gould et al; and 4,458,802 to Maciver et al. The advantages of such machines are that they may be placed in areas of large public access, such as in shopping malls or apartment buildings, and they do not require large floor space or attendant personnel.
Of particular importance with respect to such video dispensing devices is the size, operation and reliability of the internal transport mechanisms which transfers the cassettes from storage to the patron and vice versa. In this respect, it is important that such mechanisms are completely reliable, in that on malfunction can incapacitate (disable) the machine which may discourage patrons from ever using such machines again. It is likewise important to minimize the size of the transport mechanism. Because of the limited space available in such machines, it is desirable to minimize the size of the transport mechanism to maximize the cassette storage area within the machines. Further, because of the limited storage space within such machines, to avoid depleting the machine's inventory of dispensable articles, it is also important to provide a machine wherein returned articles are immediately returned to the machine's usable inventory to be available for dispensing.
Suggestions to automate a previously manually operated rental or sale operation, and systems to implement those suggestions, can also be found in U.S. Pat. No. 3,964,577 and United Kingdom Pat. No. 1,475,748 in the name of Bengtsson (automated handling system for coded bank deposition boxes), Japanese Laid Open Gazette Nos. 56-9889 published Jan. 31, 1981, 56-29786 published Mar. 25, 1981 (automated machines for renting out car keys for rental cars), as well as, 49-38689 published Apr. 10, 1974 (automated bowling shoe rental machine). In each of these prior art patents and publications, the product delivery, return and control features of the automated handling system are similar to those that have been applied to automating the rental of video cassettes.
The present invention overcomes these and other problems and provides a machine for dispensing and accepting return of reusable articles, which machine includes a compact, reliable transport mechanism which transfers articles to be dispensed from locations in a stationary, generally planar storage array to a second location accessible to the patron. In this respect, the present invention provides a machine for dispensing reusable articles having a storage arrangement and transfer arrangement which permits the storage of a large number of such articles within, and which immediately returns used articles (previously dispensed articles returned to the machine) to the machine's usable inventory of dispensable articles.